Adeo Group includes all of the DIY brands belonging to the holding company for the Mulliez family. Adeo Services, the Group’s service center, was working on optimizing its reverse packaging since September 2020. In February 2021, mainly motivated by environmental and safety reasons as well as objective economic factors, the group decided to put an end to the expendable pallet toward Euro-pallet and LPR rental pallet.

The purpose was threefold: to save money, to improve the operator’s working conditions and to act for the planet by preserving wood, our precious natural resource.

To deploy the same model through 45 warehouses, the choice fell on a tool including a control tower capable to offer a 360° vision on the totality of the pallet flows and on the whole perimeter.
As the group’s decision makers said: “Excel is not a solution if you manage exchanges with more than 40 warehouses”.

Which method to convince?

Switching from the historical model based on expendable pallets towards a consignment model wasn’t obvious, especially due to the costs management of the product’s transfer price.

• A first educational step was necessary to explain the virtuous aspects of this approach to all the Business Units in different countries.
• Then an economic model was created in order to allow all the BUs to be uniformly invoiced. This way, the Euro-pallet price differential from one country to another hasn’t been an obstacle to deployment.
• A precise set of specifications was co-written with the stakeholders to get a tailored version of Opalean.
• The platform was translated into 7 languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, Greek and Polish) and users from different countries were trained by web-demo; reinforced support was implemented during the whole phase of skills development.
• An interface has been created with LPR so the rental company gets detailed information on pallets delivered to specific warehouses where this management system is already existing.
  
• Once the users have been trained, a gentlemen agreement is signed between Adeo and the BU. It settles the starting date, the invoicing method, the operating conditions, and mostly the restitution process.

Thanks to Opalean, Adeo Services can trace its transactions in real time and obtain a consolidated view of its accounts. This way, Opalean simplifies invoicing and reduces management costs. In fact, when the restitution of delivered supports is not possible, especially for transport costs reasons, Adeo Services can invoice these supports to the concerned BUs which will reuse them in their downstream flow. As the pallet accounts are validated and aligned between the partners, the invoicing is fully accepted.

The Opatrace solution coupled with Pallet Analytics has gained adherence from the different BUs and allowed Adeo Services to obtain a real management and a consolidated vision on the number of shipped and returned pallets over the year. Precise KPIs on pallet accounts, restitution and invoicing rates ensure that Adeo receive a fine analysis of their pallet accounts and a perfect control of the budget.